Site Philosophy

This site operates as an independent editorial operation. Advertising, sponsorships, and other non-editorial materials represent the opinions and messages of their respective origins, and not of the site operator or JiWire, Inc.

February 15, 2005

Coverage Tests Don't Live up to Promises

By Nancy Gohring

This is one of those incredibly vague articles that leaves you dying for more information: Apparently MobileOne in Singapore has been trialing a handful of wireless broadband technologies—not yet WiMax—and has some negative comments about its experiences so far. Unfortunately, MobileOne declines to name which technologies it is trialing. MobileOne also said it had decided against Wi-Fi, so if you exclude Wi-Fi and WiMax, the potential technologies MobileOne might be trialing could include Flarion, IPWireless, and Navini. But it’s hard to know how MobileOne might categorize any of the vendors who make fixed broadband wireless systems that are loosely based on either Wi-Fi or WiMax so it’s hard to know if those might also be contenders.

MobileOne has so far concluded that the coverage claims from the vendors aren’t turning out to be true, but its statements about that are also quite vague. The spokesman says that it takes 1,200 base stations to cover the island with a mobile service and that some of the vendors it is trialing say they can cover the island with six or ten base stations. The spokesman says that in trials, that number increases. I wonder how significantly it increases. Even if it takes 100 base stations to cover the island, that’s quite an improvement on 1,200.

Apparently MobileOne plans to take a look at WiMax later this year so it’ll be interesting to see how WiMax stacks up against some of the other technologies that the operator has trialed.